Culture Desk

By Eliza Griswold

What happens when a culture disperses?

Tracing a culture in the midst of migration, this map follows the paths of a hundred artists who have fled Syria since 2011.

I first heard the oud, a kind of lute that was invented five thousand years ago, one summer night in 2014, in a Turkish teahouse along the Syrian border. The Syrian musician was classically trained. He was also a medical doctor who’d recently been held hostage by isis. A little out of practice, he ran his fingers over the instrument’s strings and talked about where he’d go next. No one wanted to stay for long in Turkey, Lebanon, or Jordan, where it was largely illegal for Syrians to work or to send their children to school. Despite these strictures, many refugees initially waited in one of those neighboring countries for the dictator Bashar al-Assad to fall. When he didn’t, six million Syrians pressed north. Among them were most of the country’s talented musicians and artists, who, like everyone else, were scrambling to rent apartments, find jobs, and learn languages.

Since then, the fall of Aleppo and Russian air strikes have driven Syrians of all kinds from their country. Last year, wondering what it means to be a Syrian artist when Syria in many ways no longer exists, I began to map the journeys of a hundred artists from the country. As I discovered, a large portion of the older guard of artists has ended up in Paris, thanks to visas issued by the French Embassy in Beirut. Many of the younger generation headed for the creative haven of Berlin, where rent is relatively cheap. Only a scant few remained in the Middle East, which proved expensive or unwelcoming.

Although these migration patterns appear on the map below in tidy bands, the task of gathering the data was both messy and maddening. With the help of two researchers, Tala Halawa and Max Siegelbaum, I collected names and vetted work samples through Facebook, Vimeo, and YouTube, then conducted interviews at odd hours and in three languages over Skype, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. Several of our subjects objected to being grouped with others on the list, for the usual reasons of taste, competition, ego, or politics. A few artists remain loyal to the Assad regime, which has long seen itself as a great patron of the arts. Some of the artists who were still in Syria asked not to be mapped, even anonymously, for fear that the regime would perceive them as disloyal and punish their families. A few took issue with the label “Syrian artist” altogether. “I don’t want to become part of the Syrian-refugee industry,” Sulafa Hijazi, a visual artist now living in Berlin, told me. Hijazi captures the abuses of the regime through sophisticated satire, in still images and animation. As she sees it, photographs of terrified refugees huddled on boats have helped to flatten the world’s perception of what it means to be a Syrian artist. In an attempt to do the opposite, we are sharing the stories of a handful of those whose journeys we have followed.

THE CONCEPTUAL ARTIST

Khaled Barakeh was studying art in Europe when the Syrian revolution began. He now lives in Berlin, where he is helping to form influential networks of Syrian artists online

Last year, as I began to map where Syrian artists had gone, a sculptor friend of mine who is based in Berlin insisted that I speak to Khaled Barakeh, who was engaged in a similar but much more ambitious project of his own: the Syria Cultural Index, “an alternative map connecting the Syrian artistic community around the globe and showcasing their work to the world.” A global Yellow Pages that any curator or film director can use to find and hire Syrian talent, the index also connects artists to one another.

Barakeh, who grew up in a conservative suburb of Damascus, left Syria for the first time in 2002, to see a friend in Paris. On visiting the Palais de Tokyo, he was struck with “artistic culture shock”; he’d only ever seen photocopied reproductions of Picasso’s work. “How can you teach people painting in black and white?” he asked me recently over WhatsApp. Barakeh graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus, in 2005, then travelled to Odense, Denmark, on a full scholarship, for his M.F.A. He returned to Syria from 2008 to 2011 and started a successful design business. From Damascus, Barakeh decided to apply for a second master’s degree at the Städelschule art academy, in Frankfurt. In 2011, he was granted a full scholarship, and moved to Germany. He planned to finish his studies and return to Syria.

When Hosni Mubarak, the military dictator who’d governed Egypt for three decades, stepped down, on the night of February 11, 2011, Barakeh was at a bar in Frankfurt. He rang the bell and bought everyone a round of drinks. That spring and summer, he travelled back to Damascus twice to take part in the protests and first stirrings of the revolution. At the end of summer, when school was about to start and people were getting arrested for offenses as slight as their choice of profile pictures on Facebook, he returned to Germany for good. From there, he took an increasingly active role in the revolution unfolding online. On Facebook, he helped form an influential group of four hundred Syrian artists called Amarjie, an ancient Sumerian word meaning “freedom.” Their aim was to lay out a new civil society for Syria. “We created a parallel republic,” he said, referring to the overwhelming power of social media. In secret groups on Facebook, artists and activists planned virtual and actual protests, and the line between the two blurred. Barakeh points to the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of hackers employed by the Assad regime, as an example of how the war in Syria has taken place in two worlds at once. Slowly, his participation in the virtual world became more urgent and important to him than his day-to-day life as an art student, he said. With the war now entering its eighth year, Barakeh is unable to return to Syria. He has chosen to settle among his fellow-artists in Berlin, and is practicing what he calls “artivism.” Among the projects he is working on is the first Syrian Biennale, a mobile exhibition, currently in pre-production, that will follow the route of Syrian refugees from Lebanon to central Europe and Scandinavia.

The Photographer and the Poet

The photographer Muzaffar Salman fled Damascus for Beirut, and then returned to Syria to shoot photographs in Aleppo, before settling in Rouen, France, with his wife, the poet Rana Zeid.

A girl wearing white beads and a pink puffy coat looks beyond the frame. A man we can’t see holds her by the wrist, the gesture evoking either support or menace. The image, of a girl who returned from school in Aleppo to find that her house had been destroyed by a missile, published on A1 of the Times on February 21, 2013, was taken by Muzaffar Salman, a Syrian photographer who, months earlier, had been forced to flee to Lebanon with his wife, the poet and culture reporter Rana Zeid. Between 2012 and 2014, Salman darted between Beirut and Syria, travelling through the liberated Turkish border, to take photographs of protesters calling for an end to the Assad regime. Zeid waited alone for him in Lebanon.

The two had met five years earlier at a Damascus soft-rock festival. At the time, Salman was working for the Associated Press and Reuters; he had photographed Assad at the Presidential palace several times. Zeid was reporting for Al-Hayat, a leading Arabic-language newspaper. In 2012, Salman was arrested for publishing a photograph of a protest led by twenty-eight Syrian artists, actors, directors, and intellectuals. Soon after his release, the Syrian military appeared at his mother’s home, demanding that he come to a local base for military duty. “You know what this means,” Salman said recently. “It means get out of Syria.” When the couple’s home in a besieged neighborhood of Damascus was shelled in August, 2012, Salman packed up his cameras and laptop, and fled for the border. His name hadn’t yet been added to the blacklist at the border post.

While her husband, Salman, went back to Syria to take photographs, Zeid stayed in Lebanon, where she was tracked by security forces. The couple left for Paris in 2014.

For Zeid, Lebanon was a terrifying experience. The child of Palestinian refugees, she had no passport. Her fear of being sent back to Syria manifested in intense anxiety. While Salman trekked to and from Aleppo to take pictures, Zeid began to have panic attacks. When she learned that Lebanese security forces were tracking her, she knew that she had to get out of the country or risk being deported. A friend told her that the French Consulate in Beirut was allowing artists to enter France as political refugees. She managed to secure safe passage for herself and Salman, and in April, 2014, they left for Paris, where they stayed in La Maison des Journalistes, a repurposed factory fifteen minutes from the Eiffel Tower that provides refuge to journalists awaiting legal status.

“The city was gray, dirty, without an identity for people in it,” she recalled of their time in Paris. Her description reminded me of T. S. Eliot’s London, “under the brown fog of the winter dawn.” Since 2015, she and Salman have lived in the quieter city of Rouen. They bought an ikea red chair and hung a Modigliani poster over a charcoal-gray futon. The windows face west, and, at sunset, Salman shoots landscapes from the window while Zeid does her French homework and pores over news from Syria online. They are, at most, only half in France, Zeid explained. “Syria has moved to Facebook,” she said. Salman added, “My home is the people, not the land.”

The Muralist

Abu Malik al-Shami left his home in Damascus to go fight alongside the Free Syrian Army in Darayya, where he remained until his injuries forced him to flee to the liberated region of Idlib. He refuses to leave Syria until the fall of Bashar al-Assad, an event that has become increasingly unlikely.

In 2012, Abu Malik al-Shami dropped out of high school in Damascus and travelled to the liberated town of Darayya to join the Free Syrian Army. One of his tasks was to collect books from abandoned houses and offices, and to note the owners in case they returned. If the volunteers found more than one copy of a single book, they were instructed to separate them. He and others had succeeded in collecting fifteen thousand books when the town was ransacked. Nearly all the books were confiscated or destroyed. It was around this time that Shami began drawing protest signs to encourage people who were stuck in their homes under siege. When they looked out of their windows, he wanted them to see something hopeful. Struck by the power of the signs, a friend of Shami’s suggested that he start painting murals. At first, he was hesitant; he has no formal training as an artist. Over time, he has come to rely on the Syrian artists he meets through Facebook for both inspiration and help with technique. One of them, Diala Brisly, a Syrian cartoonist now living in France, paints canvases that are hung on the sides of refugee tents. By 2014, Shami was fighting alongside the rebels by day and painting murals on rubble by night. In 2015, he was shot in the chest during a battle with Assad’s forces in Darayya. (The town remains under siege.) Wounded, he escaped to the province of Idlib, which remains part of Syria’s shrinking liberated zone. He has completed his high-school degree and is enrolled at a university there, where he studies civil engineering. Despite the risks, he refuses to leave Syria until the revolution ends with the fall of Assad.

The Novelist

The writer Rasha Abbas used an artist residency in Stuttgart to procure a visa to Europe, then hopped between fellowships and programs before settling in Lisse, a town in the Netherlands where she lives with her partner. Her collection of stories, “The Gist of It,” will be published this month.

In 2008, Rasha Abbas, who was born in the coastal city of Latakia, in northwest Syria, and grew up in Damascus, was living at home with her parents, working as a “freelance everything,” when she submitted her first short story, “Adam Hates Television,” to a Syrian writing contest. She won first prize: the publication of her first book. In 2011, when the revolution broke out, she was working as an editor on Syrian state television. She abandoned her job to join the protests, but fled to Beirut the following year, after two of her best friends were arrested. (They are still missing.) In 2014, Abbas won a three-month fellowship in Stuttgart, which gave her a visa to Europe. There she set to work on a book of stories, “The Invention of German Grammar,” about settling into German life. But in Germany she found herself crippled with shame at leaving her family behind. She couldn’t sit in the grass without feeling such crushing grief that she had to go inside. Eventually, she went into denial. “You try to pretend that you don’t miss the country and you’re totally O.K. with the idea of not going back,” she said. In some ways, it has worked, but she has also found that leaving Syria has cost her some of her power as an artist. “I feel like I signed an unwritten contract where I gave up part of my skill in exchange for safety,” she said.

The Mentor and the Student

Ammar al-Beik, the godfather of Syrian cinema, became a target after speaking out against the regime at the Venice Film Festival. He lived in Dubai before settling in Berlin in 2014.

When I watched the opening of “The Sun’s Incubator” on Vimeo, I thought that I was seeing a man wash blood from his hands: red turns the white sink incarnadine. In the background, you can hear the news—about the fall of Hosni Mubarak—and a baby crying. Seconds later, the hands reach for a paintbrush. The red is paint. The film’s director, Ammar al-Beik, considered the godfather of Syrian cinema, has little time for earnest revolutionaries; he prefers talking about Stanislavsky or Nietzsche than about politics. His experimental work, which is in the collections of momaand the Centre Pompidou, serves as a kind of manifesto for a new generation of artists.

In August, 2011, Beik travelled to Italy to attend the world première of “The Sun’s Incubator,” at the Venice Film Festival. Faced with reporters asking questions about Syria, he found himself speaking out against Assad. His friends warned him that returning to Syria would be too dangerous, and so he headed straight for the Emirates. For a time, he lived in Dubai, where his gallery, Ayyam, has a location. His rootless life has cost him a marriage; he and his wife split in Dubai, and she took his daughter, Sofia, the baby in the film, now seven years old, to live in Greece. With his passport due to expire, Beik flew to Germany and, upon landing, asked for asylum in the airport.

Living in Berlin among the younger generation of artists, Beik is now concerned with a different kind of revolution. The opening credits of “The Sun’s Incubator” read, “The future of cinematography belongs to a new race of young solitaries who will shoot films by putting their last pennies into it and not let themselves be taken in by the material routines of the trade.”

The filmmaker Avo Kaprealian, whose family fled to Syria in the Armenian genocide of 1915, now lives in Beirut.

In 2016, the filmmaker Avo Kaprealian, who is thirty-one, met Ammar al-Beik at a film festival in Copenhagen; they hit it off from the start. Kaprealian revered his mentor and Beik, in the younger filmmaker, a common belief in filmmaking as a “pure art.” Beik cast Kaprealian in his new film, “Il Ruolo,” which Beik describes as a film about solitude inspired by Nietzsche, and which he shot in Italy. Kaprealian’s films are rougher than Beik’s. His best-known film, “Houses Without Doors,” was born of the difficulty of shooting on the street; to make it, Kaprealian placed a small camera on the balcony of his family home in Aleppo’s Al-Midan neighborhood. He intercut that footage—of public funerals and the miniature mushroom clouds of distant air strikes—with intimate images of his father shuffling around the apartment and his mother washing dishes. The result is both boring and astounding; we hear the drone of a TV-news anchor as Kaprealian’s father admonishes the filmmaker to stop filming, arguing that he’s putting his family in danger. “Use your head, son,” he says. Kaprealian, whose family survived the 1915 Armenian genocide by fleeing to Syria, left the country in 2014, soon after finishing “Houses Without Doors.” He saw no reason to stay; as an artist, he said, he was out of ways to work. He crossed the Lebanese border and now lives in Beirut. “All of my friends are in Europe, in America, or Canada,” he said. “Some of them went on boats. Some of them walked for ten days through Ukraine and other countries.” He added, “All of us are angry.”

Eliza Griswold spent last year at Harvard Divinity School making this map as a Berggruen fellow.

Eliza Griswold is the author of “Amity and Prosperity: A Story of Energy in America,” which will be published this year.